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Abstract

Perhaps no inquiry reveals so much of a court's sense of identity as does that into justiciability, a concept employed by courts to limit the availability of judicial redress when a litigant's remedy more properly resides with another governmental body. When the subject-matter the litigant seeks to put in issue itself concerns governmental action or policy, the court must address a sensitive problem: to what extent might its resolution of the controversy intrude upon the policymaking function with which the legislative branch has been charged? Slow either to open themselves to claims they function "anti-democratically” or to override the informed judgments of agencies whose expertise is bent towards effectuating legislative goals, courts burdened with today's workloads show understandably little reluctance to dispose of such claims on the general ground of unsuitability for review. When a particular deficiency assigned speaks to the nature of the litigant rather than his claim, a court has defined the scope of its inquiry by reference to a discrete component of justiciability, the doctrine of standing. When it focuses upon the party seeking relief, a court inquires whether the party has established a sufficient "personal stake" in the controversy's outcome to warrant judicial review. Satisfaction of the "personal stake" requirement ensures that the court's adjudicative undertaking will go forward under the proper conditions: the parties will face each other with the "concrete adverseness" necessary for the sharp presentation of issues, and the court's resolution of a particular dispute will guarantee that its substantive policymaking role is limited both in scope and frequency. With so many fundamental concerns of the adjudicative process implicated, it is not surprising that attempts at precise delineation of the contours and content of the "personal stake" concept have yielded elusive and controversial results. The federal courts have played the key role in developing the law of standing. Caught between their generic dispute-resolving impulse and the constitutional limitation that they treat only "cases and controversies," they have looked primarily to the attributes of injury and legal interest in determining a plaintiff's suitability. In the context provided by the increased demand on the federal courts that stems from modem resistance to governmental growth and by the availability of newer procedural forms, such as the declaratory judgment, that test settled notions of justiciability, one may trace the changing interplay of injury and legal interest. The result offers a backdrop against which the developing law of standing in Maine may profitably be viewed.

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